On Colours by Philipp Weber

«The knowledge around crafts are disappearing and the rise of the digital age appears to make them obsolete. However, I think there is a quality in the dialogue between craftsmen and their material, which cannot be found in digital or industrial production.»

The ‘On Colours’ series is a continuation of my project ‘A Strange Symphony’. In that project I created a special glassblowing pipe. Reminiscent of a trumpet, it stands for the allegory between glassblowing and music. While ‘A Strange Symphony’ is a performative and playful exploration of the process of blowing glass, ‘On Colours’ is more focused on the object and on what is possible with the newly invented pipe – a strange symphony on colours.

A usual glassblowing pipe is nothing but a simple steel tube. The craftsman blows through it and creates a balloon of glass.

When I invented the trumpet pipe I included a playful mechanism with three valves. These valves are not triggering sounds, but by pressing them the glassblower creates not only one but several cavities within the molten material. The glass objects we created have all been produced with this pipe and therefore feature these multiple cavities. By using colours during the blowing process I wanted to explore how the light refracts through these cavities and how it mingles the colours of each of them. The pieces are blown in a very thick glass which magnifies the compositions of colours and sometimes creates a chromatic illusion for your eye.

With ‘A Strange Symphony’ I wanted to find an answer to the question ‘What is nowadays value of craft?’. The knowledge around crafts are disappearing and the rise of the digital age appears to make them obsolete. However, I think there is a quality in the dialogue between craftsmen and their material, which cannot be found in digital or industrial production. It is in the experience and in the interaction with a material where I often find answers to very primal topics. In this project, I aimed to reflect on the process of creating and on the myth and poetry around it.